REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK; Dinkins in South Africa: It's Not Quite Clockwork

Mayor David N. Dinkins may not be jinxed, but even half a world away from the problems that dog him daily in New York, he could be forgiven for wondering. First he had to postpone this trip to South Africa for lack of money. Then he failed to win an audience with the Pope in Rome on the way over.

Today, he could not manage to get an appointment -- already listed on his public schedule -- with the white-minority Government's acting President, Gerrit N. Viljoen, who is running the country while President F. W. de Klerk is traveling in Taiwan this week.

"From our side, there was never such a meeting on the cards," said Hannes de Wet, a spokesman for Mr. Viljoen, who is the Minister of Constitutional Development and a leading architect of the Government's moves toward dismantling apartheid. But it was understood from other Government officials that Mr. Dinkins's hosts, the African National Congress, had requested the meeting with too little advance notice to schedule an appointment.

"I accept at face value their explanation that they were unable to meet with us," said the Mayor, who stiffly criticized the Government for failing to quell factional violence as he toured the nearby black township of Alexandra today and later spoke to a committee of black groups seeking peace.

Mr. Dinkins said he did not believe the Government had refused to see him because of such comments, or because he is a guest of the African National Congress, or because he continued to press, in a meeting with business executives this morning, for economic sanctions until there is "tangible, fundamental political change, the cornerstone of which will be a democratic South Africa." An Unhealthy Rumor

If the Mayor's day did not go exactly as planned, it did not go as badly as suggested at one point. In late afternoon, a report briefly swept the Johannesburg press corps that Mr. Dinkins had suffered a heart attack.

Indeed he did -- about six years ago -- which is what the city's acting Health Commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, mentioned in passing to Michael Cottman of New York Newsday, explaining the elaborate first-aid kit brought along on the trip. But local reporters apparently overheard the exchange and it became garbled in the retelling, and the African National Congress began receiving queries about the Mayor's health. The rumor may also have been fed when Mr. Dinkins went to a hospital to visit Oliver Tambo, the ailing former A.N.C. leader.

But except for a nascent cold and plenty of jet lag, Mr. Dinkins is fit, and protected not only by Dr. Hamburg but also by more than a dozen police bodyguards from New York, their fares paid by the city. But only two of the bodyguards are being allowed to carry guns by arrangement with the South African Police.

That does not mean the bodyguards do not have their hands full. On Tuesday, Deputy Inspector Jules A. Martin carried a sack of Mets sweatbands to hand out to children, and today a detective unloaded boxes of used high school math and physics textbooks -- donated by the Hunter College campus schools -- at a black elementary school. For the bodyguards, this was not that unusual. They sometimes pitch in with similar tasks while accompanying the Mayor around New York City's boroughs. Sharing the Spotlight

Mr. Dinkins's picture made page one of the Sowetan, the main newspaper aimed at blacks, under the headline, "Welcome Home, Comrade," and the Mayor's visit prompted inside coverage in other papers, but he is not getting all the attention on the trip. H. Carl McCall, the lanky president of the New York City Board of Education, was mobbed by children at the Gordon Combined Primary School in Alexandra as he tried to pass out free pens.

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Dr. Betty Shabazz, director of Institutional Advancement at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, is given special treatment everywhere and invariably introduced by Mr. Dinkins as the widow of Malcom X. Also in the Mayor's party is Lee Dunham, owner of a string of McDonald's franchises in Harlem, who is hoping to plant some golden arches in this land of gold mines in a post-apartheid economy.

"A lot of possibilities," he said today. "The highways! That's where you make your money, on the highways. You can landscape it, and make it attractive, and people feel better there than going into the congestion of the cities. And most of those stores are given to favorite sons in every city."

But the person who may stick closest of all to the Mayor is the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, the fiery pastor of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, who manages to place himself squarely in camera range whenever the Mayor is photographed. Today, Mr. Daughtry was spied shooting some suspiciously professional-looking pool in the taproom of the Lethabong Restaurant in Alexandra.

Asked what his congregation would think, he smiled sheepishly and said, "Oh, I learned this a long time ago." A Two-Faced View

If the Mayor's tour often seem a surreal tangle of contradictions, so does South Africa. This morning, his dozen-car motorcade of Mercedeses and Volkswagen vans left the Mayor's suite at the Carlton Hotel for a township where shack dwellers grow gardens on top of graves because there is so little land, and saw where A.N.C. supporters were slain in attacks by rival blacks. Tonight, city officials took snapshots of each other and their new friends at a reception in the American Ambassador's rambling villa on a lush hill overlooking Pretoria.

This two-faced view was summed up in the immigration airport-landing cards that members of the Mayor's party, like all other visitors, were required to fill out upon arriving on Tuesday.

A marketing survey inside the three-page form asks whether tourists have come more for the scenery or the wildlife, and "trusts you will have a most enjoyable visit."

But the first page is more stark: "Temporary residence permits are issued to visitors on arrival. The permit determines the purpose and period of stay in South Africa, and the conditions may not be changed without the permission of the Department of Home Affairs."

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A version of this article appears in print on November 14, 1991, on Page B00004 of the National edition with the headline: REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK; Dinkins in South Africa: It's Not Quite Clockwork. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe